One World Romania, 2014 - Interview with Dominic Dowbekin

“It is in Europe but it’s hard to get to. I’ve seen some films made about it, usually by foreigners. And I’ve never been there, like most people”, confesses director Mark Cousins in the beginning of Here be Dragons. His remark refers to Albania, but applies to any country that either is small and remote or is being perceived as such due to intricate geopolitical and cultural forces. Irish-born and Scotland-based, Cousins himself knows a thing or two about small nations with difficult histories, and about their right to be represented beyond the conventional stereotypes. In the past, when cartographers knew little about a country, they wrote ‘hic sunt dracones’ on it on the map. When Cousins visits Albania for five days, during a film festival, he is overwhelmed by the scars left on the body of the country by one recent, still painfully real, ‘dragon’ – the Enver Hoxha regime. While contemplating Albania’s rusty monuments and its decaying film archive, Cousins reaches into wider questions about the realities of the human condition post-dictatorship, and about the role of cinema in preserving fragments of history that many would like to see disappeared.